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ISC Project Status

By June 4, 2019Blog

Refactoring and updating the SWIG R module
Richard Beare
This project is complete. See the project page for a summary.

stars: Scalable, spatiotemporal tidy arrays for R
Edzer Pebesma
The stars package currently averaging approximately 9200 downloads per month, and user involvement through github issues is rising. Look here for project status, and If you are going to useR! 2019 look for the stars tutorial.

An Earth data processing backend for testing and evaluating stars
Edzer Pebesma
Active development takes place on an AWS instance that has access to the multi-petabyte Sentinel-2 satellite image archive.  See the project page for status.

histoRicalg — Preserving and Transfering Algorithmic Knowledge
John C. Nash
histoRicalg continues to try to preserve and transfer knowledge of older algorithms that are part of R and other computational software. Our work is available  here.

Recent presentations on the project include:

Some collaborations have resulted from the project:

  • Work with Matthew Fidler on merging two CRAN packages for L-BFGS optimization and some preliminary
  • Work on a 40 year old svd method being used by NASA contractors to model Jupiter’s magnetic field.

RUGS
Joseph Rickert
So far this year the RUGS Program has awarded grants to 50 user groups and 15 small conferences totaling $31,000. We now have over 42,000 members participating in groups associated with the RUGS program.

Validation Hub (formerly called PSI application for collaboration to create online R package validation repository)
Lyn Taylor
The R Validation Hub team are now focused on designing a framework which could be used to assess package risk.  The repository would host risk metrics, examples of tests, and validation documentation which together would form evidence of the quality of an R package.  This documentation would be free to access and stored on a web based portal. The first version of the website went live in 2019 and we are also on GitHub. If you would like to be involved with the project please contact psi.aims.r.validation@gmail.com.  Representatives of the R Validation Hub and PSI AIMS SIG will also be presenting at the 2019 PSI conference in London to give an update on this initiative and their work using R in the regulatory environment.

A unified platform for missing values methods and workflows
Imke Mayer
Our website which houses articles, tutorials, data sets and a first set of workflows around a small set of popular R packages went live in January.  We will continue to provide more tutorials, assistance in choosing and using existing R packages, and data sets as time goes on. To help make this project as robust as possible, we encourage authors to submit their articles or works, and reviewers to review their placement on the platform/website, either by contacting us via our website or by submitting changes directly in our GitHub repository

Our goal is to create a benchmark of existing methods for different kinds of data (both synthetic and real data), missing values mechanisms, tasks to be fulfilled, etc. An important aspect is that this work should allow other researches and data scientists to re-use/copy our R code to compare their own method to a maximum of existing methods without having to re-implement the comparisons every time themselves.

Ongoing infrastructural development for R on Windows and MacOS
Jeroen Ooms
Rtools has been updated to GCC 8.3, and several new c/c++ libraries added to the rtools-packages repository. The new toolchain was presented at rstudio::conf 2019.

R Hub
Gábor Csárdi
The R Hub project is in maintenance mode. You can follow activities on GitHub.

Conference Management System for R Consortium Supported Conferences
Steph Locke
We have delivered a Hugo template for UseR! events and a template for creating new SVG logos for the UseR! events

R Ladies
Claudia Vitolo
We are pleased to announce that R-Ladies is now a non-profit organisation incorporated in California (United States) with 501(3)(c) tax-exempt status (a blog post will announce this publicly in the next few days). Since we can now accept donations, we have decided to join CommunityBridge, a Linux Foundation platform that allows for a transparent and traceable management of incoming donations and outgoing expenses.

The R-Ladies is continuing to grow. As per March 2019, there are 142 chapters on meetup.com with 38,000+ R-Ladies members (signed up on meetup.com) and distributed in 45 countries in 6 continents (see our shiny dashboard: ). We have also recently launched a mentorship programme to provide help and support from experienced organisers to less experienced ones. The migration to the meetup.com pro account is progressing smoothly: the last group will be migrated in 2019-Q2.

Developing Tools and Templates for Teaching Materials
François Michonneau
We developed the alpha version of the R package checker to validate links and images in static websites such as Rmarkdown and jekyll.  In addition to ensuring that there is no broken links, this package will encourage website authors to use best practices in accessibility by adding the metadata to links and images so they can be processed by screen-readers and other assistive technologies. We are starting to use this package to check some of The Carpentries lessons.

Future Minimal API: Specification with Backend Conformance Test Suite
Henrik Bengtsson
The R package future.tests has made it possible to add support for relaying messages and warnings in the future framework (a frequently requested feature) and release it in a non-breaking manner.

Strengthening of R in support of spatial data infrastructures management : geometa and ows4R R packages
Emmanuel Blondel
Milestones M1 to M5 were successfully delivered. These are identified in Github tickets with labels for each milestone.

M1 targeted provision of an INSPIRE metadata validator embedded into the geometa package. This feature has been tested by data managers in France by the French observatory for universe science, , French CNRS Research units Dynafor , and LETG .

M2 targeted the support of multi-lingual metadata encoding/decoding in geometa. All existing geometa classes subject to internationalization have been extended to support multi-language. A battery of tests has been added in all class test files. In addition to geometa, such new feature required intervention in subsequent packages ows4R and geonapi for the publication of multi-language metadata documents. An online documentation has been made available  here.

M3 provides a generic metadata converter was planned to be delivered this month of april 2019.

M4 provides Adapter NetCDF-CF core metadata) and

M5  provides Adapter for EML core metadata

 Online documentation has been made available on GitHub.

These features are being used by the IRD Marbec Research Unit and DynaFor..

Work has started for the milestones M6 and M7 which tend tackle and complete the coverage of ISO/OGC 19115-1 and 19115-2 standards in geometa by adding all missing classes (planned for completion for the summer 2019).